Adrienne Sharp - The True Memoirs of Little K

But I worried: Why would the tsarevich ever call on me when the beautiful Maria Labunskaya still raised her white arms on the Maryinsky stage?

I’ve told you I was not beautiful?

So at the theater I began to spread rumors in her name—Labunskaya had said the tsarevich was a syphilitic, the emperor a fraud, the empress a whore for having first been engaged to the emperor’s brother—and within a few months Labunskaya was exiled from Russia, dismissed from the Imperial Ballet.

And so I thought perhaps the same incantations I had used to chase Maria from the tsarevich in 1892 would repel Alix from him now. What else can one do in a beauty contest in which one’s beauty is second but lessen the beauty of the rival?

I wasn’t close enough to Alix to whisper my slurs about Niki into the air and let them buzz and stumble on their black wings to her ear. So I wrote the spells down in my own tiny hand—I know, I was twenty-one years old—sealed the papers with wax, and sent them to her in Coburg. Niki was not the only one with documents! I had said things so terrible Alix could no longer possibly love him, and when she opened my letter, the pages would spit out their slanders and she would recoil from Nicholas as Petersburgers had once recoiled from the deformities in Peter the Great’s scientific museum: a man with two fingers, a hermaphrodite, a two-headed fetus. I wrote her that her fiancé had taken the virginity of a young girl and then discarded her, that he could not be trusted, that the whole capital was saying the tsarevich was a rake, a libertine, a fornicator, that it would be bad luck for her to marry a man with such a black soul and their marriage would be cursed from start to finish. Stay away , I finished, Stay out of Russia! But Alix was then still very practical, not yet a superstitious Russian, not yet one of us with our icons and our candles and the acrostics we make of our names, looking for omens, though she would make up for lost time and double so. There would be no empress more medieval than she, eventually. But in 1894, when she saw my girlish handwriting on paper, she showed my letter to Nicholas, who had gone back to visit her, and he immediately recognized the handwriting as my own. Hadn’t I written to him enough plaintive letters on that same paper, in that same hand? I am terribly bored if I do not see you. The time drags endlessly. Who did you look at so long in the stalls?

It was Sergei who told me how angry Niki was at my letter and I cringed to imagine him reading it. In my imagination—in a scenario not terribly well thought through—Alix alone would look at the pages, swoon in disgust, and then, revived, would begin to pen a letter of her own to Niki, expressing her revulsion. Your life , she would write, is regrettably debauched . I am enclosing the diamonds, emeralds, and pearls to be given to another girl more deserving. Surely you must know of one . Something like that. But that was not what happened. Instead, she showed him the letter, the other possible outcome, of course, and Niki, who could not find it in his soul to lie, was forced to tell Alix about his ballerina mistress from the demimonde , to open up the pages of his journal a little earlier than his wedding night to show her all the entries about Little K as he had once shown me all the entries about Alix. Whereupon she wrote in the margins by his entries, I love you more since you told me that little story .

That was what I was reduced to. A little story.

But I did not taste this humiliation yet. So certain was I that this trick would work that foolishly, ridiculously, the little story began to strut about the theater and to boast, We shall see who will win, Alix or me , and the other dancers snickered even as they slinked away from such seditious talk. Yes, I made indiscreet proclamations. We shall see who will win , I cried, and the dancers looked away, embarrassed for me. My father finally sent my brother to English Prospekt to scold me, to remind me I was a Kschessinsky, not the daughter of a laundress or a scullery maid. Where was my dignity? I had no dignity. If I could not behave myself, he told my brother to tell me, they would forcibly bring me home. But they were theater people, dancers, they had not moved in the circles I had, so how could they understand what I had lost? Yes, I had become the poor girl in every ballet, the hysterical peasant girl thrown over for a princess, the hysterical temple bayadère thrown over for a princess, the hysterical Gypsy girl thrown over for a princess. Worse, I had become a matter of state. Finally, Polovstov, a member of the State Council, was told by the director of the Imperial Theaters, Vzevolozhsky, who abandoned his usual exquisite eighteenth-century manners to report on me, about my disturbing outbursts at rehearsals and in the hallways. And Polovstov went in turn to Grand Duke Vladimir, minister of the Imperial Theaters and therefore minister of me, who ordered me to the Dvortsovaya Embankment, to his painstaking imitation of a Florentine palazzo with its 365 rooms, one for each day of the year. Its long façade faced the Neva and the sunlit water made the gold-brown bricks of it glow like God’s face. A gondola floated at the pier. A gilded carriage waited at the street. No one lived closer to the Winter Palace than the grand duke. I stood at the entrance portico for a few moments enjoying its small protection and it’s a good thing I did, for the sober façade did not prepare me for the shock of the interior. The entrance hall rose several stories high around me, with walls of scarlet and gold, each arch, each cornice, each recess so heavily gilded and ornamented I felt I had stepped into a church. My mouth opened. Two giant bears, stuffed and mounted, flanked the grand curved staircase, dwarfing me further, one bear offering a tray of salt, the other a tray of bread—an old Russian custom of welcome, but I did not feel welcome. I was in trouble. The grand duke’s servants wore scarlet coats and the square caps of the Renaissance courts and carried both swords and maces, which made me feel I was being delivered to Vladimir by armed guard. It was a palace that evoked both East and West but it spoke with one voice of the Vladimirichi’s power and ambition. I had the ambition but not the power. I meekly followed a liveried servant to the library, the two-storied room a cherrywood box, domed like an aviary, with books everywhere above and below instead of cages of spring larks and winter finches, and at the great table in the center of the room, presiding over all this wood and paper, was the grand duke, Emperor Vladimir , with his muttonchop whiskers, his booming voice.

His palace is now the House of the Scientists of Leningrad. His bones lie in Russia, his wife’s and children’s scattered about France.

But on that day he was master of the house, master of me, and he had me sit down at the big table in a leather chair opposite him in which my feet barely skimmed the floor. If I’d put my thumb in my mouth I could not have looked younger. Vladimir looked at me sternly, the white whiskers of his sideburns plumped up with alarm. By this time Vladimir’s beard was also white, though his moustache still had color, and his face had thinned the way the faces of old men do as life begins to seep from them. As a young man the grand duke had had a fleshy body, a face full and voluptuous, but as he aged his face became quite elegant—hollow cheeks, the dark muttonchops gray, then white—it became an intelligent face, no longer the face of a drunken lecher. He looked like an ascetic, but he was not one: he still loved food and theater and power and women, and thank God I was a pretty young woman. Pretty enough.

My actions were upsetting to the tsarevich, he told me, threatening the security of his new fiancée, did I understand that? Nicholas and Alexandra were one day to be the father and mother of a nation, Russia’s Batiushka and Matiushka. I could not go about shrieking this way and slandering Niki in letters to Alix. I put my hands over my face. Yes, he said, he knew about the letters. Furthermore, I must know that Niki had to marry. Had matters not been settled properly with me? I nodded. So why was I still making such a fuss? The state secretary wanted me sent from the capital, with a monthly allowance to be stopped if I ever returned, he told me. Was that what I wanted for myself? I shook my head. And then I felt it—the great patriarchal fist squeezing the breath out of me like the boned corsets I danced in. I could be another Maria Labunskaya, dismissed from the Imperial Ballet and sent all the way to Paris, the city where the tsars had, for decades, sent the wayward members of their families. I did not want to be so far from home. I did not want to dance as Maria had at the Parisian Gaîté-Lyrique Theater. I was one of the tsar’s imperial dancers, not a common entertainer.